Santa Claus Fund: Christmas has become the time for giving

Fund for needy kids hopes to raise $1.6 million.

The best thing about Christmas is its infinite adaptability. Truly, it has become a holiday-of-many-colours, a movable feast, an all-purpose celebration enjoyed by everyone regardless of religious, cultural, social or economic background.

Many lament the growing detachment of Christmas from its religious roots, but that’s exactly what gives it universality. It has been bent, but never broken.

Yes, it has been decoupled from Christianity and relentlessly commercialized. But Santa Claus and Baby Jesus coexist peacefully now. And all in the name of giving.

What’s wrong with that?

The Star Santa Claus Fund, which provides gifts for 45,000 kids every year, is one of the most compelling examples of how Christmas has become the time for giving. Since its inception more than a century ago, the fund has relied upon the generosity of strangers to help the city’s youngest and poorest. This year, we hope to raise $1.6 million.

Christmas never looked so good. Still, people have tried to bury it beneath a heap of political correctness. For some, those simple words, Merry Christmas, are exclusionary and hurtful and must be avoided at all costs. Officialdom would rather leave it at a non-offensive Happy Holiday.

This, of course, misses the point. As well as being a “Happy Holiday,” Christmas is the one time we do things we normally put off — visit family and friends, pay attention to our spouses, our kids and generally think of others.

No question the pressure to give seems to grow more intense every season. Aided and abetted by a retail industry hungry to part us from our hard-earned billions, we will spend too much and max out the credit cards, thereby lifting personal debt-to-income ratios to unprecedented heights.

The finance minister will tut-tut and urge restraint — but to no avail. The governor of the Bank of Canada will fret publicly, posing carefully in front of a backdrop of decorated pine trees and glass balls.

Forget it, Christmas simply won’t be denied. It is an irresistible force, stronger than any church or nation, let alone family or individual. It overwhelms us. It picks us up, sweeps us along, helpless, hapless, happy and fully subsumed.

It makes us want to watch A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, movies scrupulously avoided at any other time of year.

It makes us want to sing “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells,” tunes so familiar we know them with our ears closed.

It makes us want to buy too many presents and eat too much food.

It’s the only time of the year when we can actually use the word “merry” without embarrassment, or even self-consciousness.

But Christmas also makes us want to reach out and be with others. It is, above all, a time of unabashed gregariousness, an occasion to socialize at home or at the office.

By contrast, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, Easter, comes and goes with relatively little fuss. Perhaps because it marks a death not a birth, it has retained its religious connotations. Other than chocolate eggs, Easter has few commercial or social implications.

Christmas, on the other hand, appeals to almost everyone, regardless of the usual complications of race and religion. Even in the Middle East, the Christmas spirit has been co-opted in ingenious ways.

Take a look at the Dubai Shopping Festival. The wildly successful event, started in 1998, manages to mine a deep well of human generosity, or acquisitiveness, without getting hung up on details of faith. It even features mall Santas and free gift-wrapping.

How ecumenical is that?

It may be true that on its way to ubiquity, Christmas had to lose its religion, but that’s what has allowed it to conquer the world. Besides, what’s more important, piety or party?

The faithful might feel such a distinction impudent, but in a world riven by violence, insecurity, recession and stress, the once-a-year opportunity to partake in the communion of a contemporary Christmas comes as welcome relief.

In the modern world, faith has become too touchy a matter to be shared. It’s better we keep it to ourselves.